Next generation collaborative systems will offer the mobile users seamless and natural collaboration amongst a diversity of agents within distributed, knowledge-rich and virtualised working environment. However this ambitious goal needs to face numerous challenges from the underlying communication infrastructure through to the high level application services which, depending on the operational need to address, can receive different answers both technological and scientific.

When most of the currently available tools supporting collaboration are based on a rigid client-server architecture and rely on a communication infrastructure like the Internet, POPEYE’ ambition is to get collaborative working free from such constraints, i.e. in an infrastructure-less environment.

In the general notion of virtualised working environments, POPEYE has addressed mobile P2P and ad hoc groups, where fixed infrastructure is not a prerequisite, where virtual communities can emerge spontaneously and share data with the appropriate quality of service (persistence, synchronisation, security,…).

Funded under the IST Call 5 of the EU's 6th Framework Program, the POPEYE STREP had a duration of 27 months, with start date 1st May 2006, and was successfully completed on 31st July 2008. Overall, the POPEYE objectives and main research activities included:

investigating and designing an integrated overlay networking architecture able to combine the stability and performance of infrastructure networks (when available) with the flexibility and spontaneous character of mobile ad hoc communications;

developing higher-level context-aware, secure and personalised core services to facilitate application development by allowing the combination of user preferences with ambient information, such as time, location, user activity, and peers’ presence.